perjantai 17. maaliskuuta 2017

Yesterday I received a donation; a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop from year 2004 with the following specs:

512 MB of RAM

60 GB harddisk

1.6 GHz Pentium M

Windows XP on harddisk

There are many lightweight Linux distributions to choose from. Off I went and swiped out Windows XP with something lighter in mind:

Lubuntu didn't fit in since it requires PAE.

Debian Linux was also out of the question - it is way too fat operating system nowadays - at least for my tiny PC!

After those two there were not that many candidates left. Thank heavens Tiny Core Linux made my day! It loads super-fast, offers a simple yet usable desktop and the latest software (for example Firefox- and Chromium-browsers).

I'm testing Fujitsu-Siemens at the moment. Wifi (IPW2200) is built-in and supported by Tiny Core Linux. Localized keyboard is not yet configured but there are instructions available.

Edit: turns out one can install Puppy Linux on harddisk. I will try it next!

lauantai 11. maaliskuuta 2017

If you have a spare PC and would like to turn it into a Chromebook you have three differerent flavours to choose from. Let's see what these OSes have to offer.

Cloudready of Neverware is available for free for individual users. You can choose between 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Bear in mind not all PCs are supported. You can find the list of certified models here. Why would you choose Cloudready? There is a company behind the the distro so updates can be expected to happen. Download here: https://www.neverware.com/freedownload .

FlintOS is aimed at RaspberryPi 3 and PC. At it's early stages FlintOS is not ready for all PC users just yet. However the project is alive and growing rapidly. So a mature version for PC might show up any time soon. If you are familiar with Raspberry Pi 3 you might want to run FlintOS on both Raspi and PC. Download here: https://flintos.io/download/ .

Last but not least there is Arnold The Bat's ChromiumOS. Arnold has been offering his version of ChromiumOS long before Cloudready and FlintOS showed up. When nothing works try ChromiumOS. My 10 years old mini laptop accepted Arnold's version while rejecting Cloudready and FlintOS. Download here: https://chromium.arnoldthebat.co.uk/ .

It's pretty easy to download and install ChromiumOS (open source version of ChromeOS) on PC. In addition there are three different alternatives to choose from. So there is no need to buy a Chromebook but to pick up a version of ChromiumOS that suits you and start to play!